This Brief reviews the past, present, and future use of school corporal punishment in the United States, a practice that remains legal in 19 states as it is constitutionally permitted according to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result of school corporal punishment, nearly 200,000 children are paddled in schools each year. Most Americans are unaware of this fact or the physical injuries sustained by countless school children who are hit with objects by school personnel in the name of discipline. Therefore, Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools begins by summarizing the legal basis for school corporal punishment and trends in Americans’ attitudes about it. It then presents trends in the use of school corporal punishment in the United States over time to establish its past and current prevalence. It then discusses what is known about the effects of school corporal punishment on children, though with so little research on this topic, much of the relevant literature is focused on parents’ use of corporal punishment with their children. It also provides results from a policy analysis that examines the effect of state-level school corporal punishment bans on trends in juvenile crime. It concludes by discussing potential legal, policy, and advocacy avenues for abolition of school corporal punishment at the state and federal levels as well as summarizing how school corporal punishment is being used and what its potential implications are for thousands of individual students and for the society at large. As school corporal punishment becomes more and more regulated at the state level, Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools serves an essential guide for policymakers and advocates across the country as well as for researchers, scientist-practitioners, and graduate students.

This book examines the historical context of African Americans' educational experiences, and it provides information that helps to assess the dominant discourse on education, which emphasises White middle-class cultural values and standardisation of students' outcomes. Curriculum violence is defined as the deliberate manipulation of academic programming in a manner that ignores or compromises the intellectual and psychological well being of learners. Related to this are the issues of assessment and the current focus on high-stakes standardised testing in schools, where most teachers are forced to teach for the test.

Escalations in student violence continue throughout the nation, but inner-city schools are the hardest hit, with classrooms and corridors infected by the anger, aggression, and criminality endemic to street life. Technological surveillance, security personnel, and paramilitary control tactics to maintain order and safety are the common administrative response. Essential educational programs are routinely slashed from school budgets, even as the number of guards, cameras, and metal detectors continues to multiply. Based on years of frontline experience in New York's inner-city schools, Maximum Security demonstrates that such policing strategies are not only ineffectual, they divorce students and teachers from their ethical and behavioral responsibilities. Exploring the culture of violence from within, John Devine argues that the security system, with its uniformed officers and invasive high-tech surveillance, has assumed presumptive authority over students' bodies and behavior, negating the traditional roles of teachers as guardians and agents of moral instruction. The teacher is reduced to an information bureaucrat, a purveyor of technical knowledge, while the student's physical well-being and ethical actions are left to the suspect scrutiny of electronic devices and security specialists with no pedagogical mission, training, or interest. The result is not a security system at all, but an insidious institutional disengagement from the caring supervision of the student body. With uncompromising honesty, Devine provides a powerful portrayal of an educational system in crisis and bold new insight into the malignant culture of school violence.

This timely book presents a data-driven approach to preventing and responding to school violence. As school violence receives increasing attention across the nation, the application of scientific knowledge is critical. For maximum effectiveness, transdisciplinary teams should use school data, logic models, and theories of change to design, implement, and evaluate interventions. Collaboration among key stakeholders is also necessary to address both structural and systemic barriers to success with violence prevention. With concrete methods for promoting safety in primary and secondary educational settings, this book will engage and enable school faculty, counselors, administrators, and other partners to better understand areas of common interest and learn how to work together more effectively.

Although compulsory schooling intends to develop the potential of all students, some students may actually be harmed by schooling practices. In this book, researchers and practitioners identify and examine various aspects of systemic violence, particularly as it is embedded in administrative and pedagogical practices. Some of these are obvious—racism, harassment, and child abuse—however, systemic violence is insidious and may reside in "common sense" practices intended to improve student performance. The authors explore some of these subtle manifestations of violence from a variety of perspectives by investigating school administration policies, pedagogical methods, labeling, classroom interaction, children's games, and teacher reactions to child abuse.